Attachment Difficulties From Early Years Trauma Or Developmental Trauma

[sun seeker]

@Kaluki, your letter is excellent. I could relate to most of it. I really hope it gets the response you are hoping for.

 

[watundah]

You know, I think she is armed with all of the right tools. But 50 years is a long time to wallow in maladjustment so the grain runs deep. I think I simply do not want to be seen. I used this thread as motivation and just sent her a long note about my frustration around the inability to open up. Again. I brought it up at end of session yesterday but we didn't have time. I think sometimes that it can never be fixed. And while I understand all of the whys, I just don't change. Grr. Head bang. Eye roll. I appreciate your help Thanks for this thread!

 

[sun seeker]

@watundah (or anyone else for that matter), have you read Healing Developmental Trauma? It's the best book on different attachment styles and why one person would have one rather than another, based on what developmental window was missed. Also what to do about it. Its author, Laurence Heller, has an interview on YouTube as well. I have a different kind of attachment issue and go into extreme distress when I feel I am not being seen. Different places our development got interrupted, perhaps?

 

[Deleted member 33880]

You know, I think she is armed with all of the right tools. But 50 years is a long time to wallow in m...

I was totally ignorant of attachment symptoms and how to treat it, until 2010. I have found it really helpful to understand this condition though I am like you, in my fifties so sobbing like a two year old doesn't really suit how I perceive myself. ;)
there are books around about it. I also talk to a psychologist in the UK who has written a lot about it. I have found that the majority of therapists only know the Bowlby level of attachment theory and how it relates to kids. They don';t know about the adult knock on problems and some very ignorant ones even think dependency is a terrible thing. It is not if it is attachment disorder. It is a necessary stage. Anyway, I have been on a steep learning curve. So has my therapist. I am happy to share with you what if I know if in any way I am a little ahead of you. so fire away and keep telling us how it is going for you.

 

[Deleted member 33880]

@watundah (or anyone else for that matter), have you read Healing Developmental T...

I shall look that up SunSeeker. Thanks. I also get very upset if I am not being seen. I shall just paste some of what happened in therapy yesterday - oh the shame. :facepalm:
Journal entry: (bit long I am afraid, but you get the full flavour of my current distress in therapy)

Little Kaluki is very little and exceptionally distraught. She is in high amygdala arousal all the time these days. I feel deep fatigue from both the trauma of this and the relentlessness. She cannot bear her therapist/dad abandoning her. She literally cannot bear it. And I try to live with this, moment by moment. It is a hell.

T just goes into ultra calm therapist mode when he sees her distress. He repeats calmly and quietly ‘but I AM leaving you. Yes, I have made this decision’ and she goes into sheer terror mode. It is like some cruel form of torture. HE thinks he is being the ‘good’ therapist for making it clear and keeping to the script. Little K disintegrates every time. Every single bloody time and he looks on and watches me disintegrate and curl up in fetal position and crawl under the table and he watches and waits until I come out then he does it all over again.

I am left in turmoil and terror and the only thing that helps is to manically colour in my colouring in book to stop me from hitting the walls or banging my head.


I was aiming for ending from summer 2017 -2018. I know in my heart that would have worked for me. That is what really sucks. He doesn’t believe that. If he did, I am sure he would not be wrecking what was going to be a good ending. He has never encountered anyone like me. He told me early on that he had never met a client who willingly left therapy so he has had a great deal of practice of keeping to the ‘broken record’ technique of ‘ I am sorry you feel upset about this but this therapy is ending’. He has not encountered a client where it is possible to have a good ending on their own terms so basically he didn’t trust that I could do it. For me, a good ending was always crucial after all the abandonment in my life, from parents and from therapists. If he had told me at the beginning: ‘I am going to bail out early on you because my partner who is older than me will put pressure on me to retire early and at that point I won’t have your best interests at heart. One of the most crucial things in therapy for you is to NOT be abandoned and I will abandon you like the long list of therapists who have done this to you already’, I would not have started working with him.


I don’t feel heard by him anymore. I don’t even like him anymore. How could I?


Little K is stuck in her old routine of desperately needing soothing and affection but the person she is wanting it from is the person who keeps abandoning her and hurting her.


And he is hurting me. I feel it physically. Every single comment of his from ‘ I want to stop working with you’ or ‘ I have made my decision to end and yes, it is bad timing for you’ or ‘ I know this is not a good for you but I am doing it anyway’ hurts to the core and damages so much of the good work we have been trying to do over the past five and a half years. It is so destructive. But he says that he hopes ‘I will retain some good from our work together’. That is what the previous counsellor said. I don’t think they can hear how sickening that comment is. Sometimes I think therapists like this should be lined up and shot for the damage they inflict. They should at least try not to harm us further but they seem to find my Achilles heel and then go for it with gusto.


I was trying to leave yesterday because he just went on and on about shortening sessions, about reducing to one session a week etc etc. He is in such a hurry to get me out, get the ending on some sort of timetable that will work for him, that I am not even considered. I am flailing around here and he is wanting to discuss reducing sessions? This man is unbelievable. We are trying to mend the most major rupture we have had so far that is dragging on horribly and destructively, and he wants to insist we focus on shortening sessions and reducing sessions? As Bill said, ‘he is not exactly tuned in to your level of distress, is he?’


I am terrified too that little K will do things that will make this explode in my face. Yesterday as I was trying to leave prematurely and was nearly out the door, I/she let out a volley of ‘no stop it’ and pummelled him with her little fists. Really. I know. I got such a shock. I actually hit him! (Not very hard – I was in small tiny child mode.)

At first I was so in littleK distress that I didn’t even realise what had happened. She was crying and so incoherent. Then when I did realise I was terrified of what he was going to do. Then I got even more distressed and was yelling at him: ‘Listen to me! Just listen to me!’ and he wasn’t. He was still doing his ‘talk quietly and rationally and demonstrate by opposites how irrational and hysterical she is being’. Little Sarah took his face in her hands to MAKE him look at me, SEE me – crying ‘ JUST LOOK AT ME! JUST SEE HOW I AM!’ but he pulled away and I backed off in shock. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I just felt mortified. I looked down at the floor and muttered a very tiny ‘ I’m sorry’ . I expected the full onslaught from him. I just wanted to run away but my legs weren’t working.


I feel like I am two or three years old and he keeps coming to my hospital bed where I am in physical pain and anguish and he keeps quietly telling me he is going to leave me and stop seeing me and walk away leaving me in pain, and I just can’t bear it. Each time I can’t bear it. I have no means to cope with this. He thinks that if he keeps saying it, I will adapt. I don’t. I go into strange anguished parts of myself where I was left in pain and my parents didn’t come and the people who were meant to be helping me left me too. I don’t seem to survive this. He has the worst track record for fighting my corner and cannot be relied on to make sure I have support for when he abandons me. I cannot bear this. He says stupid things like ‘I am sure you will be okay’ . Him saying that to me means that I feel even less heard. HE wants me to be okay. It doesn’t help him trying to convince me that I will be okay because he wants it to be okay.


And then yesterday he just went on and on about winding down seeing him and how we have to plan it. And there is no one in place to help me with losing my T. I just colour in frantically.


I can’t do this. I can’t. It is too much for me. I can’t let little T go through this torture all over again. I can’t let her experience all over again the damaging anguish of being dropped and discarded because she is not a proper person who matters, done to her by the person that is her primary attachment figure. Done to her because he can.


So I am trying very hard to make T a person whom we don’t care about and won’t tell things to. He asked about my choir tour. Of course I wanted to tell him. I was dying to tell him. In detail. He said ‘ would you tell me how it went?’ and the hurt part of me said ‘no’ and just like my dad, he shrugged and that was that.


It is not good. It is no use wanting to be a real person that my t cares about. He used to say ‘I care about you’. He said at one point yesterday: ‘I am TRYING to keep caring about you’ which shows that he doesn’t but is trying to. I am not someone who is important to him. I wasn’t important to my own parents either . I sent my parents an aerogramme from India, saying things had gone wrong and that I had had a very difficult time and that I was now in another part of India trying to recover. I couldn’t say I had been raped as I was in shock still and hadn’t got my head around it at all. (It took me two years to be able to face the fact that I had been sexually assaulted. I still find the rapes a bit hard to handle knowing about. ) I hoped my dad might fly out to help me. But no, they wrote back that they hoped I was having a good time in the new place. I just don’t seem to matter. My T couldn’t even spare five minutes out of his day to find out what a £300 NFB session had found out about my brain. You’d think he too would be dying to know, after working with me for five and a half years. No, he was not dying to know. He felt it was entirely reasonable that I wait for Friday to tell him. Wait three days. From his point of view that is reasonable. From my point of view it was not kind or supportive or involved. I will not be treated like this. He seems to want to train me to realise that I am not important. Big events like this are not important and he will not respond. I can imagine that if one of my children was in a major accident and I texted him he would probably text back now and say ‘ I will be seeing you in a week. We can talk about it then.’


He says I get more that I should get from him as it is.

That is what he said yesterday.

He says it through clenched teeth. Like he knows he is actually damaging me by walking out on me but that is his defence: you get too much from me already.


I am a client in a long list of clients and he wants to get rid of all his clients now and I am just one of the whole bunch that he is walking away from. My friend warned me he would do this. She warned me that he would think it was acceptable to bail out on me at some random time that suited him. I defended my t and said he wouldn’t walk away from me knowing I was still in distress. She said he would. He would find a way to justify it. She said his heart wasn’t in it. It was a job to him.

And she was right.


Why do I trust these people? Why do I open up to them? Because I am desperate and vulnerable and fragile and so they can toy with me until they lose interest.


And then on top of all this, we have adult me trying so hard to protect little me from the cruelties of my t. So I am trying to do positive things and look up courses I could do and think of ways I could have a more busy life, even with CFS/ME – so that I have a life that will help me survive being dropped from several thousand feet by my t.


And I can’t tell any of that to my T because he will use any thing I say about having scrabbled to find a course to go on or a person to teach me NLP as an excuse to not use NHS resources on me and not get me the support I need. He is really good at finding excuses. I guess he just has had loads of practice.


This is doing my head in. I really really need to sort out how to leave him.

It is very hard to like my therapist when he doesn’t have my best interests at heart. It is impossible to trust him.


He hasn’t a clue how to do this ending. He is dismissing little me and not engaging with her. He is insistent that she is over looked whilst we be sensible and plan a time table for cutting sessions down. He is denying that he is like a dad to her and that she loves him and was being brought into being by his love and kindness. He is denying all that whilst insisting in the same breath that he isn’t.


If he was more like a loving dad, he would be cheering me on with all the positive stuff I am doing, showing real interest and involvement in it, showing how he is working like crazy to get support in place for me and reiterating every session that we are not going to lose touch, that I can phone him. But he just doesn’t do any of that. He will probably decide that he has changed his mind and we can’t keep in touch. That would be true to form. He does go back on his word frequently. How can I trust a man who is carving me out of his heart and is insisting each week that we find yet another way for him to distance himself from me.


He views this as my pathology not as a consequence of his behaviour to me.


I started sobbing last night at choir. I haven’t done that for nearly three years. I went out and lay down and waited for it to pass. I just felt so left, alone and in physical pain. I had witnessed the choir being kind to a couple of people who were feeling a bit ill on tour and I just kept going and smiling even though I was scared how exhausted I was getting. I felt I was about to black out. I did tell people I felt ill but I looked so okay I don’t think they believed me. In the end I just kept hoping I could battle on by being positive and hanging on in there with all I had left. It sort of hit on Tuesday. I went back into choir hoping I could keep it together but before long I was crying again, I had no tissues, I couldn’t sing, I was frozen to my chair, I was mortified and I prayed that the rehearsal would hurry up and finish. It always feels like everyone is aware but ignoring me. I felt so ashamed. I left quickly at the end pretending I was fine.


CFS/ME really bad, - obvious payback from being on tour


I am feeling that I need to get to reassure my T and tell him that a part of me is looking forward to doing all the hypnotherapy and stuff and learning new stuff that will help me and also to end this long painful therapy with him and move on with him in my corner. But I fear he will then put even less effort into getting me support if I say that.:oops:

 

[Deleted member 33880]

sunseeker : I bought the book - should get it in 2-3 days.

 

[watundah]

@sun seeker thank you for the book rec. I will seek that out.

You know it just occurred to me that in my relationships I tend to want my mate to attach to me while I remain distant. Maybe the role reversal in therapy is what whacks me out.

Honestly, @Kaluki , that is a sad story and I don't think I would handle it as well as you. I imagine shut down mode and not.going back. No.closure just a big FU.

Thank you for your offer to help. I have read articles about the attachment styles but haven't done a deep dive. I will look for that book.

 

[sun seeker]

He repeats calmly and quietly ‘but I AM leaving you. Yes, I have made this decision’ and she goes into sheer terror mode.

I feel so much for you when I read this. I couldn't get through the rest of the journal entry, I am empathizing too much. I would be feeling exactly the same way you are. So sorry!!

 

[EveHarrington]

MAJORLY freaking out!

I just found out when I called my psych that he's going down to one day a week!

I wonder if he's tapering off his private practice. He is now a medical doctor of a clinic elsewhere, a clinic I don't officially qualify for. Maybe he'll grandfather us in? Maybe he's tapering off and I need to find a new doctor? Ugh.

 

[Deleted member 33880]

MAJORLY freaking out!

I just found out when I called my psych that he's going down to one day a...

how often did you see him before or like now?

 

[EveHarrington]

@Kaluki

I'm down to 2x a year but I've been seeing him for many years.

It's complicated by needing to find a doc who will continue my current meds. Many won't prescribe benzodiazepines.

 

[Deleted member 33880]

@Kaluki

I'm down to 2x a year but I've been seeing him for many years.

It'...

Do you mean 2x a week? If you do mean 2x a year, then it won't really impact on you that he is down to one day a week? I am feeling a bit confused....